Vandal Love

by D. Y. Bechard

  On the first crisp autumn day, his grandmother took his hand and led him from the house, along the road, past fields of nodding wheat to the bus station. East, the signs said as they left town, and he wondered if the first children of creation had travelled those same highways.

  Montréal was his new home, buttressed sky, rooftops climbing like ziggurats, and a shabby apartment twenty minutes from the downtown, on Létourneux near Hochelaga. He walked to school, returned for lunch, and each night, a half-hour before bed, was allowed to read from a stack of yellowed comics that his grandmother had discovered in a cupboard and that dated back twenty years. She received charity from the church and other institutions, boxes with dried goods and castoffs. What little money she earned was from knitting with three elderly neighbours, and together they sat in the crammed living room, talking in vivid bursts. Sometimes they listened to a radio station that played classics, the folk songs of la Bolduc or le Quatuor Alouette, during which they became silent but for mild exclamations of Oh, le temps and Mon Dieu. Often they asked François to read from the Bible and interrupted with their praises.

  His room was the pantry, emptied of shelves, its only decorations a crucifix and a metallic print of the Virgin. A tablecloth hung in the doorway, checkered red and white and so threadbare that, winter mornings, when the harsh, low sun shone through, he could see the yellowed walls of the kitchen. Unable to sleep, he lay his head on the windowsill and gazed up at the prairie moon. He listened for each hoot in the street, for the discordant note from a distant guitar or a girl’s laugh.

  His grandmother arranged for him to be an altar boy, and he was sent home with a dollar for her after every Mass. He helped Père Wilbrod, an ancient priest who reeked of cigarette smoke. Though François wanted to please his grandmother, he struggled in his studies and in catechism. He was shy and dreamy, tiny for his age and often picked on. His grandmother sewed his outfits, his underwear even, cloth so coarse that on humid days the seams crawled like ants along his thighs. His hair was cropped, nearly a tonsure, she having perceived evil in curls. He believed her decree that he was good and that the other children his age had been corrupted. He concluded that he would someday be a priest, though he felt little in the pews, nothing like standing among the corn, tassels swaying above as he closed his eyes to the sun and turned, eager to be lost, to wander those fields forever.

  When François’s mother had died, Georgianne had gone through every drawer and closet but found no trace of Jean, only the mother’s birth certificate, a list of debts and a stack of letters in English, which she could not read but kept just in case. The rest she burned with the sheets from the death bed. She had no doubts. The ghost had brought her, and so she gave herself to raising François, afraid only that he might die like a runt or that the septic drone outside her window take him away. She’d have preferred a village, the quiet to meditate on salvation, but unknown origins would be noticed and gossip could hurt prospects.

  Her years of wandering had not been kind. Her knees and ankles were gnarled, feet as twisted as roots. Soon she could no longer go out. François ran errands, and she sat by the radio, dipped into sleep and woke to the puffing of an accordion. Sometimes he pretended to have questions about his father just so he could hear those other, much better stories, Hervé Hervé who’d wrestled champions from miles away, le Suède, le Géant, le Russe Noir, or that of the brawny boy and his frail sister. He thrilled at this incredible love.

  Only when he was almost sixteen did François begin to doubt. He tallied the years. His grandmother had searched for him seven, a saintly number hence suspect, and he’d been six. He learned from the encyclopedia that gestation lasted about 280 days, a little more than nine months. He tried a computation, discovering that if his father had appeared to her as a ghost, it must have been within weeks of conception. But François vaguely recalled that even in the last months of his mother’s life she’d still been waiting. A few warm evenings she’d believed his father would return, and because of the unsteadiness of her hands, she’d taught François to do her makeup. Together they’d stared at her reflection, her jet hair seeming alive against her skin. With unnecessary slowness he’d drawn in her lips and eyes and cheeks, each minute stroke tugging at her skin so that she’d made sounds in her breathing as if with pleasure. Afterwards they’d waited on the porch as mosquitoes swarmed up from the fields like smoke against the low sun.

  On the first day of Christmas break, he began to search. A cold snap had covered the windows in frost, and his grandmother had surrendered to a soporific stupor next to the radiator. The site for the Stade Olympique had been planned not far from their block, and with the thundering of cranes and cement trucks and jackhammers she wouldn’t hear him. At the bottom of her sewing kit, next to her spare rosaries, he found a bundle of letters.

  At school he’d learned a rudimentary English, just enough to make sense of what was written. Dear Madeleine, each one began and went on to mention a mining town or a new construction project in the Yukon or Alaska. They spoke of money and said that he would be home in the winter if all went well, and each, at one point, asked about little Frank. How is little Frank? Is he growing up well? In some dim, distant place François could recall his father calling his mother Madeleine. Each letter was signed Frank and almost every one had a different return address, in the Yukon or Saskatchewan or British Columbia, two in Alberta, one in Alaska. A few mentioned her illness and asked if she’d been taking her medicine. The last in the pile read, Tell little Frank I said hello, or do you still insist on calling him François?

  A snowplow dragged its blade along the street. It was a merciless early-winter afternoon, the sun glaring on snowbanks, the radiator clanking and hissing. Jackhammers worked in the distance. His grandmother snored with her mouth open, showing brown molars.

  He took out his English grammar. More meticulous than he’d been in all his years of schooling, he wrote a simple letter explaining who he was, that his mother had died and that he was seeking his father. He copied it eleven times, once for each of the various addresses, pausing to rub the cramps out of his hand. Then he filched money from the can beneath the sink. He bundled against the cold and mailed them in the few minutes he had free before Mass.

  By that summer François still had no response. Being small for his age he’d kept on as an altar boy, and Père Wilbrod, who took sips, as cross-eyed by litany as a trucker by the shear of highway, hardly paid him any mind. But he’d stopped sending money home and François’s grandmother had become too blind to knit, could barely pay the rent and feed them both with the welfare cheque. She was no longer the woman whose jaw distilled the wrath of God.

  Will you be a priest soon? she asked and spoke of how priests received a stipend for life.

  François considered getting a job but hardly knew where to begin he looked so young. Money offered possibilities, freedom, normal clothes, a ticket back to the prairies. Did he need a reason to want it? The solution came a few days before school let out. After Mass, Philippe, another altar boy, showed him an ad in the paper: two hundred dollars for young men willing to go through sleep deprivation in a room without light.

  There are better ones, Philippe told him, and reading the ads, François agreed that taking medicine didn’t sound bad. After all, medicine is good for you, they agreed.

  Those first weeks of summer vacation, as the sun dried out alleys and girls wore clothes they kept only for those months, he and Philippe applied to several of these positions but were turned away for being too young. Afterwards they walked the Mont Royal, seeing hippies kissing on the greens. In a ten-cent theatre they watched a lurid film about time travellers.

  At the fifth job they applied to, a survey of nasal sprays, the lounge was filled with students and homeless people. While Philippe was getting applications, a prostitute—François was almost certain—came in and sat next to him. A few times he’d seen them lounging in the street in vinyl suits, but even for a guidoune this one looked odd �
��a halter that read New Jersey in peeling letters, white boots, cowgirl style with silver studs and tassels. She was clearly pigeon-chested, shoulders hung back as if with elegance. Lipstick marked her buck-teeth. Her hair was black and ratty and cut just above her eyes. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and through the last e in Jersey he could see the imprint of her nipple. He moved a seat away.

  I don’t bite, she said with an accent from up north somewhere. She tugged at her skirt. Her voice was nasal, and François considered that the spray she was about to get might change that. He joined Philippe at the counter, where he learned that it was a no go. They left, and a few days later, when François showed him a flyer he’d found on a telephone pole, Preference Test—All Men, All Ages, Philippe said that he was getting a real job. You’ll probably drink juice, he concluded after reading the flyer.

  The address was in the downtown, in a skyscraper as strange as a spaceship, made of concrete and curved glass and with indentations like streamlines. He went inside and up an elevator to the fourteenth floor. The office he was looking for was crammed with buzzing consoles, wires criss-crossed under tables, monitors flickering and walls hung with graphs. Half the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling had burned out, and a man was scanning words and numbers on a stack of accordion printouts that he flipped through without detaching the sheets. On the desk next to him was an ashtray so crammed with upright cigarette butts it looked like a sea urchin.

  Can I help you? he asked, still reading. The room smelled of smoke and paint fumes.

  I am here for test, François managed in his poor English.

  Yes, of course. The man spoke evenly, his movements brusque and mechanical. He had an equine face, impassive and without wrinkles. He picked up an application form. You are, what, fourteen, fifteen?

  Eighteen, François said.

  The man’s eyes flickered up from the paper and back. He wrote down fifteen, then slid François the questionnaire.

  There’s no legal requirement, he told him. Just try to tell the truth. It’s confidential.

  François checked boxes and scribbled answers: religion, schooling, colour, food preferences, employment goals. Other goals. Are you a virgin? Homosexual?

  When he’d finished, the man told him to follow. He opened a door.

  At first glance the darkness was absolute. No light from outside penetrated. François took a few testing steps before he began to discern walls that had been painted black.

  A moment later the man wheeled in a slide projector. He crossed the room and reached up to emptiness and pulled down a screen.

  This is a preference test, he said. Since it’s your first time, I’ll give you the first one. If you come back in a few days, I’ll give you the second as well. Twenty dollars each time.

  Okay, François said. Okay.

  The man brought in a cardboard box and what looked like a starkly futuristic vacuum cleaner. He flicked a switch and several red lights came on. He hooked a cord into the back. It ran into a hole in the wall.

  The vacuum hose wasn’t making a sucking noise but seemed to be humming. From the box the man took a pair of bulky rubber underwear that could be tightened with a strap. There was a circular plug-in on the front that he hooked the hose into. All right, he said, you can drop your pants. François reluctantly undid the button and pushed them down. The air caressed his thighs and gave him gooseflesh. Vingt dollars, he told himself.

  Your underwear, too, the man said. It won’t hurt.

  The room was dark. François lowered his underwear. His scrotum tightened. The man knelt and fitted him, the rubber smooth and elastic. François flinched as the hose took hold gently as a mouth sucking a thumb. A green light flickered on the vacuum. The man wiggled the underwear. The tiny light stayed on. The contraption emitted a low, almost comforting beep.

  I want you to count from zero to one hundred and thirty-two by increments of twelve, then back to zero and up again and so on. Don’t think about anything but counting. Just look at the pictures that come up.

  He went out and closed the door. The way the light cut away from the darkness reminded François of the sci-fi film, the hero about to be teleported into a future populated by beautiful, lonely women. The projector clicked, a blinding square on the screen, then again. The image of a tree appeared, branches laden with red apples. François lost count at seventy-two and had to close his eyes for a second to get to eighty-four. The projector hummed and clicked. A billy goat stood in a churned-up barnyard, its legs slightly splayed, as if it had come to a sudden stop. It tilted its black-striped face to the camera. It had long, curved horns.

  François continued counting and each click brought a new image: a half-eaten apple, a bowl of glistening cherries, a man’s hairy foot with yellow, ingrown toenails, the Notre Dame Cathedral, mountains, ballerina toe shoes, an aerial view of New York, a crumpled cassock, a soapbox house, a rose, a block of melting ice. Then the projector shut off and François was left to stew in the dark before the underwear was removed.

  What was de … eh … de reason for dat? he asked, blinking in the office that before had seemed quite dim. His scrotum and thighs felt breezy.

  The purpose, the man said, is to study subliminal reactions.

  What is subliminal? François asked, but the man waved his hand and said in sloppy French, just as mysteriously, that the machine measured changes in tumescence.

  While François pondered this, the man took twenty dollars from a cashbox. Don’t forget to return in three days, he said. The second test is a lulu.

  What is a lulu?

  You’ll see, the man said and gave him the money.

  ———

  During the cold, slow months of January and February François’s letters had crossed the country to non-existent boarding houses, to post offices in quiet towns, their dams and power plants long since built. Letters with no return addresses were kept a month or two, thrown in the trash. For years a man had visited these places, retracing his life. He rattled doors of boarded-up houses. He asked for girls by name decades after brothels had been burned down.

  Almost forty years he’d followed jobs from Ontario to Alaska, mining, logging, building dams and pipelines. He’d kept a half-Inuit girl near Fairbanks who had two boys, an Irish woman in Vancouver kept by others as well and who’d birthed a colourful race of children, and the French girl in Manitoba, whom he’d liked best, the boy, too, his, no doubt. On one visit the Inuit woman was gone, the house occupied by another family. The Irish woman died of pneumonia and the children, he’d later heard, were scattered to orphanages. She’d had a daughter by him, she’d claimed, and it had been this girl he’d recalled while he was lying in a prostitute’s bed. The young woman had gotten up and had gone to the mirror. She put on a summer hat and took a long ribbon and tied it above the brim so that the ends hung against her naked shoulders. Gradually he realized he’d seen this before, the daughter who’d supposedly been his and who’d followed him about whenever he visited. She’d once stood in the doorway and put on a hat and tied a ribbon to it. Though by now she might be the age of the girl at the mirror, she’d been a redhead and this one had dusky colouring. He got up and dressed and drove through the day to Vancouver. He visited every orphanage, but he’d lost track of the years and she might have grown or died or been adopted. Then he made the arduous drive to Manitoba. The house was rented by another family, the woman and his son gone.

  Work had kept him sober, but over the months that he searched there was more time to drink and more reason until he was hardly searching, just wandering. As a boy, he’d been the smallest in the family, and there had been a bad winter when his joints had begun to ache and swell until he had the knuckles of an old man, bulbous elbows and knees. On the day the doctor told him he would be a cripple, he crawled outside to where the firewood was stacked. He took the biggest piece he could handle and lifted it repeatedly. Each day he worked his gnarled hands around the wood. Despite the pain he was eventually able to pull up a rotten stump and
crumble it. Muscle had given shape to warped bones, and he moved awkwardly, but with strength, like a man wearing armour. The pain of this simple achievement, he believed, had hardened him. But seeing the girl tie the ribbon, something gave. Now the buildings he’d built were old and each place he returned to no one remembered him. He sold what he owned to keep drinking. He crossed the prairies on boxcars. The last of the spring rains churned ploughed earth until it reflected the glowering sky. He woke occasionally to anonymous empty plains. A bit of light came through the clouds, but he’d had no taste for religion. He recognized the next town. At the boarding house the man knew him. He fished through a stack of letters until he found one, quite recent—that’s why he remembered. Frank, he said. Right. You stayed here in ’62. Frank nodded and took the envelope. There were men like this, who never forgot a thing.

  The day after the preference test François wandered the city, asking himself what he might desire that he didn’t know. He passed a blind man with a guide dog, stores with draped bins of dates and olives. Did the bodylong for things he could not fathom? And what of the soul?

  As he neared home he noticed that a squat man was sitting on the metal stairs. He had his elbows on his knees, his gnarled hands clasped together.

  Boy, he said in English, his voice slurred. Is there a young man named François or Frank who lives up here?

  François smelled alcohol. The man had on a new button-up shirt but his jacket was dirty.